A number of technologies are available for three-dimensional imaging such as ultrasound and tomography. In medical imaging, for example, an imaging system captures a three-dimensional image from a patient for the analysis of bodily tissue.
Data from such three-dimensional imaging systems is presented in posters, journal articles, slide-shows, etc., in the form of two-dimensional images. To convey three-dimensional information, multiple images representing views that are perpendicular to each other are presented together. So that a viewer may fully understand the spatial arrangement of features within the subject, the spatial registration between the perpendicular views must be communicated to the viewer.
At present, users such as physicians or scientists make such presentations by saving images to a desktop, pasting them into a word-processing program, and then drawing in lines or words to show the spatial relationship between the images. This process is laborious and time-consuming. Further, it is imprecise and subject to mistakes. If an operator exports and saves numerous views (e.g., ten or twenty or so) and then imports them into a document, the operator—relying on memory—may draw the incorrect relationship between images. Further, since indicator lines and text labels are positioned by hand, they will not always show the precise portion of the image that is intended.
Thus, while modern imaging systems are capable of capturing sophisticated three-dimensional data from tissue, results from such systems are often underutilized, due to the fact that composing high quality presentations is laborious and error-prone. Physicians or scientists sometimes do not have the time to create high quality figures that accurately represent features in a patient's tissue. For these reasons, the diagnostic capacity of imaging systems is underused, features revealed by three-dimensional images are missed, and medical conditions may go undiagnosed.